


Disappearing Ink

by sidneysid



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dramatic Haircuts, Galra Keith (Voltron)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-22
Updated: 2018-03-22
Packaged: 2019-04-06 16:56:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14061330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidneysid/pseuds/sidneysid
Summary: As a child Keith didn't realise how strange he was. He didn't realise that the reason he and his father lived in a shack in the desert was because it would be dangerous if somebody found out what Keith was. He didn't realise that he probably wasn't a human.





	Disappearing Ink

Growing up, Keith never thought he was very strange. His father taught him to read, to write, taught him about the stars in the sky and the plants in the ground and how to survive in so many situations. That, really, should have been the tip-off, except Keith did not know any better. It did not occur to him how strange it was to be raised in a shack in the desert, the same way he didn’t realise how strange it was that he never went to the doctor, or that his father never took him to town. His whole world was his father, the desert, their shack. It didn’t occur to him that his father was hiding them from something.

When his father died his whole world crumbled. The man who was his only companion for the first years of his life, the only human he really talked to, was gone. Luckily, by that point, his father had started to teach him that there was something about them that they needed to hide. His father had taken him to town, had taught him how to interact with people, had taught him about money and manners and how to blend in with a crowd. His father had started preparing for him to enter society, slowly and safely and with plenty of escape plans in case things went wrong. And then, of course, things went wrong in the one way he hadn’t prepared for  —  only, he had prepared for it. He just had never prepared Keith for it. Keith lost his father. He lost their home. He lost the desert, the clean expanse of stars above him and the quiet earth below. 

Cities were loud, full of strange smells and sights. He was always on the alert. It was hard to focus over the looming sense of dread and threat that followed him. His foster parents talked about him at night when they thought he couldn’t hear them. They called Keith unsocialised and strange, and used worried voices to discuss how to help him fit in. Keith didn’t really care what they said about him, but when they insulted his father he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He recognised a few words  —  prepper, conspiracy theorist, crazy, controlling. Abusive. He saw red.

He learned, slowly, to keep his temper in check. He learned how to pretend to be unhearing and unseeing, unresponsive to everything. He tried to follow his father’s lessons, to make himself inconspicuous and unnoticed. Living with other people was a special kind of torture. Trying to pretend he felt nothing only made it worse. Either he was too angry and intense or too quiet and sullen. None of them were like his father. These people wanted to be lied to. They wanted to believe he was happy, that he was thankful, that he cared about all the pointless bullshit they thought he should care about. They wanted him to be a different person. But they weren’t his father. They didn’t understand and he intended to keep it that way.

His teenage years were spent bounced from house to house and guardian to guardian. In a way it was good, really, none of them knowing him long enough to get suspicious. Years of hiding and running and keeping his head down meant he learned things even his father didn’t teach him. Sometimes he thought his father would be sad to see what he has to do. Sometimes he hoped his father would be proud, because he knew above everything his father would want Keith to survive. And that meant staying hidden, no matter what it took. 

He had a sheath of papers to his name, a birth certificate and vaccination records and all the little records that a child picks up as they grows. He was pretty sure all those papers are fake. His father was very well prepared. Keith’s childhood revolved around the man, after all, and looking after a child isn’t easy. His father’s life was split between Keith and an empty space that they rarely talked about, but without which their lives would have been unrecognisable.

Keith doesn’t remember his mother. He remembers a lot of his childhood  —  mornings spent in the desert, midday spent in the shade, nights spent in their tiny house listening to the radio or reading his father’s well-worn collection of books. The desert was a land of extremes; scorching heat in the day, freezing cold at night, dry and dusty except for the rare rains which were so torrential it was like standing under a hundred shower heads. He had to learn to survive anything that was thrown at him. He never had a chance to think it strange that one person was raising him, and not two.

The woman who gave birth to him was nothing but another one of his father’s stories. Keith greedily clutched at every hint he was given about her, this mysterious woman whose name and face he didn’t even know. His father didn’t talk about her much. There were no pictures of her. He’d shown Keith a knife once, with a strange design, and said it had belonged to her. One night, as they lay under a blanket and looked up at the stars, his father had told Keith that he had her eyes, her nose, her jaw  —  but if that was all he’d inherited maybe their lives would have been a little different. 

It was like something out of a fantasy story. One day a child is born with purple hair. The child’s father hides him and dyes his hair and makes sure he wears hats outside in case his roots show. When the child isn’t a child anymore he colours his hair himself, sneaking out to dye his roots brown-black in public restroom stall sinks. Keith knew humans didn’t have purple hair, not naturally. Humans couldn’t hear the things that Keith could, or see in the dark like Keith did. It was lucky his eyebrows were darker than the hair on his head, almost black, and their purplish sheen could be overlooked as a trick of the light. But the hair on his head, which his roots grew through, was very clearly purple. Which was impossible, though he’d been searching his whole life for some kind of proof that it wasn’t. It didn’t take a lot of piecing together for Keith to figure out that his mother probably wasn’t a human. Whatever it was that made Keith, it was strange and dangerous. Nobody could know.

Keeping his secret in Galaxy Garrison had two major stumbling blocks. One was his need to sneak off-base regularly. The other was Takashi Shirogane, his self-titled mentor and the man who eventually became the closest thing Keith had ever had to a friend. The first he could handle, though it earned him a reputation for being distant and hard to locate. The second one was a fluke. He tried to shake Shirogane away the way he did everybody else. He’d worked so hard to get into Garrison, to get a chance at seeing the stars and maybe, someday, figuring out the truth. 

Garrison was a dangerous place. He lived his life on the palm of the government’s hand, and if they realised what he was he’d have no way to escape. Sometimes he’d wake up in the dorms and marvel that he hadn’t ever been caught, that he was here and hidden despite everything Sometimes he’d lay awake at night convinced that they already knew, that they were watching him for some kind of sick experiment and eventually they’d get bored and pull the rug out from underneath him.

But if that was true then Shirogane had to be part of it, and thinking of Shirogane having ulterior motives was as difficult as trying to look at the sun without blinking and equally painful. He’d failed spectacularly at remaining under the radar. He’d been noticed, and nothing he could do would shake Shirogane away. So he adapted. He played into the role. Let Shirogane get close whilst keeping his biggest secrets hidden. It was a bad plan. At night he lay awake, a sensation in his gut like being eaten from the inside out. Probably it was guilt.

When Shirogane had told Keith about the Kerberos mission Keith had been happy for him, and a little jealous, and a little anxious. When the mission went south Keith didn’t crumble. He exploded.

When they kicked him out of the Garrison the desert called to him, embraced him like a long-lost relative welcoming him home. Here he had nobody to hide from. He had nobody at all. It was startling how easily he adapted, like he’d never really left the desert at all. After the first week he barely missed the amenities of city-life, the Garrison’s steaming hot showers replaced with collected rainwater and evaporated groundwater collected in tanks and used cold, the mattress replaced with a sofa-bed. When he needed food or to do laundry it was a 40 minutes ride into the nearest town, which felt like visiting another planet. The mannerisms of people were hard to adapt to after time spent alone, their habits and rituals suddenly strange. He tried to visit as little as possible. Which meant his roots started to grow out. 

His conundrum was clear: visit regularly to get hair dye and have to deal with people asking questions, or don’t and let people see you have dark purple hair growing out. He started wearing a hat when he visited town, not wanting to waste money and water on hair dye, but that got riskier and riskier. He’d kept his hair in one style his whole life. It had been the style his father had cut it in and he didn’t see any need to change it. But now he had a need. He’d been cutting his hair since his father died and knew how to use a pair of scissors.

Strands of dark brown-black hair fell into the sink. When he finished he ran his hand over his head, feeling the surprisingly softness of his newly-shorn hair. It didn’t look good. It was uneven, due to the fact he’d never cut his hair this short before, his forehead looked too large without his fringe, and the back of his neck felt cold to be so exposed. But it was better than walking around with purple roots, probably. At least if somebody saw him now they’d think he was dyeing his hair to be trendy or rebellious. Nobody would be keeping track of him closely enough to noticed he wasn’t buying any dye. And if they did, well, that meant he had bigger things to worry about.

He made the money he needed to survive by racing his bike, mostly. Illegal races could pull in enough cash to live off if you won, and the discomfort of his interactions with people were soothed by the rush of air against his skin and the sound of his heart beating hard in his ears. Maybe his father wouldn’t be proud of him for giving up his dream, for dropping out of school, for making money through illegal hoverbike races. But he wasn’t a normal person and his father must have known that. He couldn’t have expected him to live life however normal people did. When Keith was a child he hadn’t realised that he was abnormal, but he also hadn’t realised how rarely his father seemed happy. And if his father could be content with rare and fleeting moments of happiness, then surely Keith could be too. Survival was more important than joy. Safety was more important than comfort. Privacy was more important than relationships. 

There was something calling to him. Like a breeze pushing at his back, so faint he couldn’t identify it at first. He tried to follow where it was leading him. He went out on expeditions into the desert, mostly at night to avoid the heat but sometimes lasting these journeys lasted for days. When he was back at the shack it was hard to ignore the sense that he should be out there, searching. One day he realised he was walking away from his house and didn't know why. He doubled back, packed a bag, and followed his instincts.

He found caves with ancient carvings, lots of them dotted around the desert. He found, carved inside them a message that feels like it was left just for him. Not the stories about the blue lions, but the secret those stories held. it took time for him to figure out the stories were all hiding clues, and then it took time to figure out what those clues meant. At first he held onto a strange and fleeting hope that this was something his mother left behind, something that he could use to uncover who she was and who he was. But the carvings were far too old, the message too generic. Something was coming. It was coming nearby. It was coming soon. Something was going to happen, and it was going to be important. The rational part of Keith’s mind knew this prophecy was ridiculous. The part that had pulled him here, that had let him find these despite how impossible it seemed, knew that it was true.

When an alien spaceship crashed from the sky Keith was ready for it. He’d figured out exactly when these stories said the event was going to happen. He’d planted explosions as a distraction for when Garrison showed up. He’d been training in preparation for whoever  —  whatever  —  would be coming. He wasn’t ready for it to be Shiro, and he definitely wasn’t ready to hoist Shiro over his shoulder, turn to make his escape, and be confronted by three kids. One in the front, probably the leader, whose jaw dropped when he saw Keith. Two behind  —  a big guy with nervousness radiating off him in waves and some scrawny kid with glasses too big for their face.

“Keith?” He sounded like he was somewhere between shock and excitement. “What happened to your hair?”

Keith squinted, trying to recall if he’d ever met the guy before. The guy looked around, realised where they were, and very obviously forced himself to look relaxed. He sauntered over to Shiro’s other side  —   Keith didn’t even realise people actually sauntered like that, in real life  —   and slung Shiro’s arm over his shoulder, declaring, “I’m saving Shiro.”


End file.
